Days in AR History

William Fosgate Kirby from Texarkana (Miller County)—who had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in law from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in the same class as his father—married Ella Kelly of Texarkana. Kirby established a law practice and later became an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He also served as state attorney general and a U.S. senator. In 1903, he was commissioned by the General Assembly to produce an authoritative compilation of Arkansas’s statutes, which was published the following year as Kirby’s Digest of the Statutes of Arkansas.

Hot Springs (Garland County) native Mary Lewis made her opera debut in Europe as Marguerite in Faust. Lewis was possibly the most publicized singer of the 1920s. Using her childhood training, she climbed her way to grand opera, gaining stage experience through vaudeville and operetta. Her career included radio performances and recordings with HMV, Victor, and RCA.

Frank “Jelly” Nash, who was the deputy warden’s chef and general handyman, was sent on an errand outside the prison where he was being held and never returned. Nash had been enticed across the U.S.-Mexico border and arrested for robbing the Katy Limited in early 1924. On March 1, 1924, Nash and three members of the Spencer gang received twenty-five-year sentences at the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for mail robbery and assault on a mail custodian. After his escape, Nash was apprehended by the FBI in Hot Springs (Garland County) the day before his death during the Kansas City Massacre shootout. He is buried in Paragould (Greene County), where he had spent part of his childhood.

A state exhibition planned by the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts opened at the Arkansas Arts Center (now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Thirty artists were allowed to show three paintings, and ten artists from the exhibition were chosen to include their work in a Washington DC exhibit. The Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts is composed of a group of prominent Arkansas women who work to support female Arkansas artists.

The first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was published. The Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas’s first newspaper, had been established in 1819, seventeen years before Arkansas became a state. Its editorial stance for law and order during the desegregation of Central High School in 1957 earned the newspaper two Pulitzer prizes—the first time in history one newspaper won two Pulitzers in the same year. Known for its liberal editorial pages in a conservative Southern state, the Gazette closed on October 18, 1991, after a bitter newspaper war with its cross-town rival, the Arkansas Democrat.

Adrian Brewer, an acclaimed artist who made Arkansas his adopted home, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Rosa Koempel Brewer and widely recognized portrait artist Nicholas Richard Brewer. Brewer married Edwina Cook of Hot Springs (Garland County), whom he met while accompanying his father on a portrait-painting commission. The younger Brewer established the Adrian Brewer School of Art; during World War II, he initiated a program to bring art to the average citizen. Beginning during the Depression, he painted more than 300 portraits of prominent Arkansas citizens. He is also known for his pastoral paintings of the Southwest and rural scenes in Arkansas.

The enmity that many Harrison residents felt for the African-American population came to a head following the financial collapse of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad and the attendant loss of jobs and income. A white mob stormed the jail, took two black prisoners and several others outside the city limits, whipped them, and ordered them to leave town. In what became known as the Harrison Race Riots, the mob then went on a rampage in the black community, burning homes and shooting out windows before ordering the black residents to leave town.

More than 500 men and twelve machine guns arrived in Elaine (Phillips County) from Camp Pike in order to quell what they had been told was a race riot in progress. Governor Charles Brough accompanied the troops in order to assess the situation. Touched off by white reaction to the possible formation of a sharecroppers’ union, the Elaine Massacre claimed the lives of an unknown number of African Americans, with low estimates at twenty-five and high estimates at 800.

The Arkansas Razorbacks football team extended its winning streak to fifteen games by defeating Texas Christian University by a score of 28-0 at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock (Pulaski County). After the team had completed the second undefeated regular season in a row, the winning streak ended at twenty-two games with a defeat at the hands of Louisiana State University in the January 1, 1966, Cotton Bowl.

The Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame opened with a permanent home in the Pine Bluff Convention Center in Jefferson County. Created to celebrate Arkansans who have made outstanding contributions to the entertainment industry, the museum honors performers, non-performing contributors (such as writers, directors, and producers), and pioneers in the entertainment industry. A life-size animatronic statue of Johnny Cash greets visitors with some of the most popular songs of his career. Many other well-known Arkansas entertainers, both performing and non-performing, who have been inducted into the hall of fame have contributed artifacts to the exhibits that represent their achievements. For example, the museum houses Bob Burns’s “bazooka” as well as the musical instruments and clothing of other performers.

Painter Essie Ann Treat Ward was born in the community of Nubbin Hill (Searcy County). She is often referred to as “Grandma Moses of the Ozarks” for her paintings, which are fascinating examples of primitive art. From a field of 150 folk painters, she was chosen as one of the top ten in Arkansas, receiving recognition and appreciation in her native region and state.

William Fewell “Casey” Laman was born on a farm north of Jacksonville (Pulaski County) to James Newton Laman and Anna Fewell Laman. Laman exerted a vigorous—albeit dictatorial—style of leadership during his sixteen-and-a-half-year reign as mayor of North Little Rock (Pulaski County). Serving four terms from 1958 through 1972, and the balance of an unfilled mayoral term from 1979 through 1980, he modernized one of the state’s most populous cities by directing millions of federal, state, and local dollars for housing, education, recreation, and infrastructure.

Helen Hagstrom was born in Cash (Craighead County). Hagstrom, under the name of Carolina Cotton, is best known for her country and western swing music and yodeling, as well as her appearances in numerous television specials, radio programs, and films. Nicknamed “The Yodeling Blonde Bombshell,” Carolina Cotton was an entertainer and teacher throughout her life.

Samuel Kountz Jr., a physician and pioneer in organ transplantation, particularly renal transplant research and surgery, was born in Lexa (Phillips County). An Arkansas success story, he overcame the limitations of his childhood as an African American in the Delta region of a racially segregated state and the handicaps of inadequate early education to achieve national and world prominence in the medical field.

Esther Bindursky, editor of the weekly Lepanto News Record for thirty-four years, had published in the Saturday Evening Post her story about a young Lepanto (Poinsett County) man, Staff Sergeant Jimmy Hendrix, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. She was also a skilled photographer. One of her nationally circulated news photos of a nun who survived a 1955 train wreck in Marked Tree (Poinsett County) that killed five people won a first-place National Federation of Press Women (NFPW) award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Howell A. “Doc” Rayburn joined the Confederate army when he enlisted in Company C, Twelfth Texas Cavalry. The regiment moved to Des Arc (Prairie County) in March 1862 and prepared to board steamers that were to carry them to Mississippi. When the regiment departed, they left Rayburn behind with a fever. In 1863, after a long recovery from his illness, he began recruiting local youths to form a guerrilla band. For the next two years, Rayburn and his band were a nuisance to Union military authorities, attacking scouting and foraging parties. In at least one such attack near West Point, Rayburn’s men donned Union uniforms and took their enemy by surprise. Numerous expeditions were mounted to capture Rayburn, but none were successful.

Lafayette Gregg was named chair of the state banking association. That same year, he was appointed as a state commissioner to represent Arkansas during the “World’s Columbian Exposition” (the World’s Fair of Chicago) in 1893. He died in November 1891, however, only a month after becoming the banking association chair and two years before the fair. Gregg was a member of one of the pioneering families in northwestern Arkansas and was involved in nearly every major historical event in Arkansas history that happened during his lifetime. Most remembered as an instrumental figure in the location of Arkansas Industrial University—later the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County)—he was also a banker, lawyer, state representative, Civil War veteran, and Arkansas Supreme Court justice.

Violet Brumley Hensley—who has been called the “Whittling Fiddler,” the “Stradavarius of the Ozarks,” and the “Fiddle Maker”—was born in Mount Ida (Montgomery County). Before she was sixteen, she made a fiddle for herself, patterning her work from her father’s fiddle-making and with his guidance. After marrying and raising nine children, she continued her work of making and playing fiddles. In 2000, she was designated an Arkansas Living Treasure by the Arkansas Arts Council. She has been featured in national magazines, has appeared on well-known television shows, and has had a weekly radio show. In the twenty-first century, she continued to teach fiddle-playing and fiddle-making at her home in Yellville (Marion County), while still assisting with the repair of instruments.

John Henry “Barnie” Barnhill—successful head football coach both at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville—died. Barnhill left the most lasting imprint in Fayetteville (Washington County) as UA’s athletic director. Barnhill was elected to the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame and the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame and was among the eight inductees, including Frank Broyles and Clyde “Smackover” Scott, composing the first class of the UA Sports Hall of Honor founded in 1988.

President Jimmy Carter nominated Elsijane Trimble Roy to be the first woman federal district court judge in the Eighth Circuit, as recommended by Senators Dale Bumpers and John L. McClellan, and the U.S. Senate confirmed her on November 1, 1977. Roy occupied the position for twenty-one years, taking senior status in 1989 and retiring in 1999. Roy was Arkansas’s first woman circuit judge, the first woman on the Arkansas Supreme Court, the first woman appointed to an Arkansas federal judgeship, the first woman federal judge in the Eighth Circuit, and the first Arkansas woman to follow her father as a federal judge.

Reconstruction-era Arkansas representative and U.S. congressman James Hinds was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Hinds’s funeral procession in Little Rock—consisting of military, state, federal, county, and city officers, as well as fire companies, representatives of black schools, and average citizens—marched from the capitol to the railroad station. All businesses closed during the procession. Hinds’s remains were returned to Salem, New York, via railroad transport and ultimately interred in East Norwich, New York. He also has an honorary marker in the U.S. Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC.

The international Nature Conservancy headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. The Arkansas field office, established on April 12, 1982, became the organization’s twenty-ninth state program. The Nature Conservancy’s mission is to preserve the plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.

During the Cold War era, the Ninety-seventh Bombardment Wing at Blytheville Air Force Base (renamed Eaker Air Force Base in 1988) was placed on airborne alert when it was discovered that nuclear missile silos were being constructed in Cuba with Soviet assistance. The following day, the Strategic Air Command declared defense readiness condition (DEFCON) II for the first time in American history. Two B-52G bombers were placed on airborne alert and were ready to strike the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons if necessary. The standoff ended, and the wing returned on November 15. The wing was presented with the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award for its performance during this Cold War crisis.

Race car driver Mark Martin earned his first Winston Cup victory at North Carolina Motor Speedway. Martin was the only driver from Arkansas competing in the top circuit of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). At the height of his career, he ranked tenth on the all-time win list and sixth on the all-time pole position list. In 2017, he was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

Dr. Timothy J. Cloyd was installed as the tenth president of Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County). Plans for a college village to be built on an undeveloped tract of land owned by and adjacent to the college were announced a few years into Cloyd’s tenure. His president’s report for 2005–2006 stated, “We change the lives of those who will change the world.”

Federal and Confederate forces met just outside of present-day Bryant (Saline County) in a minor engagement of the Civil War known as the Skirmish at Hurricane Creek, or the Battle of Hunter’s Crossing. After raiding a Confederate arsenal at Princeton (Dallas County), Federal troops were met by the Eleventh Arkansas Confederate Cavalry. The skirmish was of little tactical significance, but it resulted in twenty-eight men killed and eleven wounded.

The Pacific & Great Eastern Railroad Co., which built a line to Wyman twelve miles east of Fayetteville (Washington County), incorporated. The line was doomed when the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Co. built a branch line to St. Paul and Pettigrew in Madison County. The St. Paul branch provided transportation for a great amount of hardwood for processing into railroad ties, furniture, handles, and various other wood products.

The city of Black Rock (Lawrence County) incorporated. Situated on the Black River at the edge of the Ozark Mountains, it reportedly takes its name from black rocks in the area. The city was a boomtown, rising due to the development of railroads and timber interests, and was later sustained by the pearling industry.

Aaron Woodruff Lyon, the founder of the first academy chartered by the State of Arkansas, died of pneumonia in Fresno, California. Lyon was also instrumental in the development of Batesville in Independence County and Elizabeth in Jackson County.

W. B. Worthen died after a short illness. Upon his death, the Arkansas Democrat editorialized that “some of the largest and most important financial transactions of the State were engineered and executed by Mr. Worthen…with unswerving integrity and honesty of purpose.” Worthen was a banker in Arkansas from 1874 until his death, and he also wrote a history of Arkansas banking. The bank he founded survived recessions and the Great Depression, becoming the largest bank holding company in the state, until its acquisition by Boatmen’s Bank in 1994. It then became part of Bank of America.

William Badgett Gatewood Jr. died. Gatewood was a nationally recognized scholar and longtime professor of history at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). He also served briefly as chancellor of the university. Gatewood was the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books and more than seventy-five articles in scholarly journals. In addition to his service to UA and the history community, Gatewood was also a founding board member of the Fayetteville Community Foundation and the Walton Arts Center Council and served as a member of the board of directors of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and the Arkansas Humanities Council.

Nathaniel Mattox “Preacher” Doke married his first wife, Matilda Gaer Ballard, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Doke was a Benton County pioneer, evangelist, entrepreneur, and benefactor. The Methodist exhorter “talked from his heels” in a sincere, convincing manner and was also a master carpenter, blacksmith, farmer, hunter, and fiddler. By the turn of the century, Doke had married for the third time and fathered a total of twenty-three children, seven of whom were borne by Ballard.

The Skirmish at Buffalo Mountains took place. The outcome of the skirmish was ultimately inconclusive, as both sides completed their objectives, with Colonel Joseph O. Shelby continuing to retreat southward following his raid into Missouri, while the Federals were able to keep the Confederate forces from returning to Missouri.

The New York World referred to the Black Hawk War, a Reconstruction-era political and racial conflict, with the classic rhetoric of the times, as “a foray of infuriated blacks armed to the teeth, and led on by a scoundrel carpet-bagger upon a town, with avowed intent to slay the men and violate the women thereof.” Mississippi County was a hotbed of violent, racist activity at the time, and many African Americans wanted to protect their newfound freedoms. Charles B. Fitzpatrick’s flight after shooting Sheriff J. B. Murray in August 1872 (and subsequently arming himself with a guard of African Americans) and the unwillingness of the state government to intervene seem to have left local black citizens open to reprisals.

William Arthur Carr, Arkansas’s first Olympic double gold-medal winner, was born in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). He set new records for track and field in the 1932 Los Angeles, California, Olympics and was named to the Sports Illustrated All-Time Olympic Team in 1954.

Les Pomeroy and fellow University of Wisconsin classmate Eugene P. Connor sailed on the Monteagle from Vancouver, British Columbia, bound for Japan. With five letters of introduction, they managed to find work doing dry kiln consulting. They worked as seamen from the Philippines to Japan, China, Egypt, India, Siberia, and Italy, then across the European continent to do forestry research in France and England. Although Sierra Club founder John Muir championed forest conservation by setting aside large acreages, it was Pomeroy who devised a conservation plan for growing and harvesting timber that both conserved it and turned it into a renewable resource. His science-based management plans regenerated timberlands across the South, and he carried out his groundbreaking work in Arkansas.

The first World Championship Quartz Crystal Festival began, which was attended by some two thousand residents and visitors from coast to coast. The Quartz Crystal Dig is held annually the second week of October in the Mount Ida (Montgomery County) area. The dig is a three-day event with two divisions: crystal points and clusters. The winners keep the crystals they mine and share in $1,500 in prize money. Contestants pay a $75 registration fee and compete in both divisions. In addition to the prize money, there are crystal trophies for each of the two categories and other prizes. About 10,000 people attended the dig in 1998. This included visitors from twenty-nine states, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Outlaw Jim Miller was born near Van Buren (Crawford County). Miller spent much of his life, however, in Texas and Oklahoma, where he earned a reputation as a professional assassin, manipulating the court system to avoid prison. After Miller killed former Oklahoma deputy U.S. marshal A. A. “Gus” Bobbitt near Ada, Oklahoma, in 1909, Miller and three of his associates were arrested and placed in the Ada jail. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1909, a mob overpowered the two jailers, took Miller, Joe Allen, Jesse West, and Berry Burrell to a nearby stable, and lynched them. A photographer was called in, and his photograph of the four men hanging has become an icon in the lore of the Old West.

The Action at Pine Bluff was fought when Brigadier General John Sappington Marmaduke’s Confederate cavalry division attacked the small Union garrison under Colonel Powell Clayton, which had occupied Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) following the capture of Little Rock (Pulaski County). Resulting in a Union victory, it was the last sizable military engagement in Arkansas in 1863.

Diane Divers was born in Washington DC; her parents were both attorneys. Diane Frances Divers Kincaid Blair was a nationally respected educator, writer, speaker, political scientist, and public servant who authored two influential books, served as board chair of the Arkansas Educational Television Commission, chair of the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, member of the Electoral College, and professor of political science at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). During the successful Clinton-Gore presidential bid of 1992, Blair took a leave from UA for a year to serve as a senior advisor, researcher, and chronicler of the cross-country campaign. In May 2000, Blair was presented an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by UA. Blair died of lung cancer on June 26, 2000.

The Delta Heritage Trail State Park was dedicated. The park is being developed in phases along seventy-three miles of abandoned Union Pacific Railroad right-of-way through Phillips, Arkansas, and Desha counties in eastern Arkansas. In early 1991, as part of the “rails-to-trails” provision of the National Trails System Act, which preserves rail corridors by reclaiming land along abandoned railroads for recreational use, the Union Pacific Railroad notified the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism of the potential track abandonment. While the northern and southern ends of the trail are reserved for hiking and biking, there are plans to operate an excursion train along the old rail line in the middle of the trail.

The Daisy Airgun Museum was relocated to its current home at the corner of First and Walnut streets in downtown Rogers (Benton County). This historic building, dating to 1896 and known as the former Rexall Drug building, was selected for the high visibility to tourists traveling U.S. 62. The museum houses an expanded collection of airguns and displays of antique furnishings, posters, postcards, photos, letters, advertisements, catalogs, promotional materials, and World War II items. The mission of the non-profit museum is to preserve and protect the collection of airguns and artifacts related to the history of Daisy Manufacturing and to make it available to the public. In addition, the museum serves a growing community of collectors of Daisy guns and memorabilia.

Scottish stonemason Robert Brownlee married Annie Lamont of Little Rock (Pulaski County). Brownlee had been twenty-three when he read about the December 1835 fire in New York City and the need for help in rebuilding the city. He arrived in New York in 1836, where he found work cutting stone. Four months later, he was hired by the architect for the State House in Raleigh, North Carolina, to cut stone for the capitol building. As the building neared completion, he learned that skilled masons were needed in Little Rock to help finish what would come to be known as the Old State House. Brownlee lived in Little Rock from 1837 to 1849, and the Brownlee House is preserved on its original site at the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock at 3rd and Cumberland streets.

A tornado killed seven people, demolished forty homes, damaged numerous businesses and homes, and caused $100,000 in damage in Dardanelle (Yell County). The following month, the Arkansas River flooded, reaching 32.1 feet, the highest river level since April 1927. The flood caused 108 refugee “county” families to evacuate to Dardanelle for ten days, and 50,000 bushels of corn were destroyed. The construction in 1969 of the Dardanelle Lock and Dam as part of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System helped control this kind of flooding.

A tornado swept through Hamburg (Ashley County), killing seventeen people and leveling twenty-five homes. Hamburg had been laid out in October 1849, two months after Ashley County was formed from part of Drew County in the area earlier known as the Great Wilderness. With the town’s designation as the county seat, two of the first public buildings were the courthouse and the county jail, erected in 1850. The site was chosen at least in part because the legislation organizing the county required that the county seat be within five miles of the county’s geographic center.

Television writer, producer, and director Kenny Johnson was born in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Johnson is the creator of numerous Emmy-winning projects including The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, the original miniseries V, and Alien Nation. Johnson is the only producer/creator with three shows on “TV Guide’s 25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends”: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and V. In addition to producing and directing, he is a published novelist and teaches filmmaking seminars at major film schools in the United States and Europe.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois. After serving as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock (Pulaski County), Clinton (wife of Arkansas native Bill Clinton) became first lady of Arkansas, first lady of the United States, and U.S. senator from New York, marking the first time in U.S. history that a first lady was elected to the Senate. Her independence and public involvement with a number of issues have sometimes made her a subject of controversy, but her support of women’s and children’s issues has won her many admirers. On January 20, 2007, she announced her candidacy for the presidency of the United States. Though widely viewed as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, she eventually lost the nomination to Barack Obama. In 2009, she became secretary of state.

Union colonel William Dewey surprised Confederate colonel John Q. Burbridge’s Brigade at Pitman’s Ferry (Randolph County). Dewey’s rapid combined-arms attack temporarily won control of the ferry and allowed for the reconnoitering of the Pocahontas (Randolph County) area. This was the last major Civil War engagement in Randolph County. Pitman’s Ferry continued to change hands until the site fell deep behind Union lines in 1863. Afterward, only occasional raids and guerilla activity attracted attention to the location. Two markers are near the site, but the actual location is in private hands.

The yellow fever quarantine in Little Rock (Pulaski County) was lifted due to cooler weather. The Little Rock Board of Health had ordered the quarantine three months earlier because of reports of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee. Travel by water and rail was prohibited, and freight, express packages, and mail from infected districts were prevented from entering.

A monument placed by the L’Anguille Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Marianna (Lee County) was dedicated. The monument marks the “initial point” established during an original survey of lands added to the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. While re-surveying the boundary between Lee and Phillips counties in 1921, surveyors Tom Jacks and Eldridge P. Douglas of Helena (Phillips County) had discovered the witness trees marked by the Robbins party in 1815 as the initial point of the Louisiana Purchase.